Now that you’ve got a Dirxion digital edition, how can you ensure that it gets the proper attention of your audience? Excellent question. Here we’ll help you navigate some tried-and-true practices and essential promotion tactics that should be part of any successful online publication strategy.

Integrate your digital edition into your current social media strategies
Your digital edition is social network friendly, which means you can easily create links to your digital edition from your favorite social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. Actively integrating digital editions into your existing social media strategy will offer visitors both new and old, quick access to your brand and will help increase reader interest and grow your online business.

And don’t forget that once inside your digital edition, users will be able to share your interactive publication on their favorite social networks by utilizing our “share” feature. So … use social media to circulate your digital edition to your customers, and then let your customers start circulating it for you. That’s working smart.

Facebook – Does your company have a fan page? Then be sure to post a link to your newest digital edition on your wall or to the sidebar of your profile page. You can even integrate your entire digital edition into your page by utilizing our Facebook App. And don’t forget to periodically include links to interesting digital edition articles or new products and announce the latest issue in your status updates. According to a Retail Omnibus study conducted by Morpace Inc., nearly 70 percent of consumers said a positive referral from a “friend” on Facebook would positively influence their purchase decision.

Twitter – Twitter is a powerful tool for promoting your digital edition, your content and communicating with your audience. While you’re tweeting, make sure to drop an occasional link to your digital edition pages. It’s a great way for new followers to not only get the information they were after, but also become more familiar with your company and your publication.

LinkedIn – Although status updates may not be followed by “connections” quite as diligently in LinkedIn as other networks, their are plenty of other ways to communicate with your audience. Many publishers (especially b-2-b publishers) have created groups with open discussions and news updates about their industry. Including links to articles of interest, providing “Answers” with links to articles and announcing new publications can be a great way of keeping your connections up-to-date with your publication.

YouTube and Flickr – Some of our clients use images and videos to promote their products on YouTube and Flickr. Don’t forget to include links to relevant catalog pages or magazine articles that use those images / video. If a customer liked what they saw on Flickr or YouTube, then they might just like to read about it, too.

Deliver targeted email campaigns with a clear call to action
An interactive publication is an asset; promote it to your customers via email campaigns. Send an email prior to launch as a teaser and then send another to launch your digital edition to your targeted audience, making sure to highlight some of the hottest content in the digital edition to prompt clickthroughs.

Don’t have the resources to build an email campaign on your own? No worries – we have a dedicated team to fully execute an e-mail marketing campaign for you! Our SmartMail program is one of the most valuable ways to reach your customers. Designed to extend the reach and increase the usage of our clients’ valuable digital publications, SmartMail allows you to easily deliver your digital publication into the hands of those that matter most. We are typically able to deliver the digital publication to inboxes before your printed publication even hits the streets! Our results speak for themselves. Since the e-mail program’s inception, our clients have seen an average clickthrough rate of 17% and overall online publication usage increase by 27%!

Advertise on external sites
Create a banner ad that notifies people about your interactive, online version, and use the banner in an ad campaign on verticals, local businesses (news stations, chambers of commerce, newspapers, real estate companies), industry blogs, etc. You can also generate an Adwords campaign for additional exposure on external sites.

Include a direct link to your digital edition within your email signature
That way, every outbound email you send will be an advertisement for your digital edition. Simple, creative, and free!

Provide above-the-fold visibility on your homepage
Featuring your digital publication in a prominent position on your home page will naturally grab the attention of your customers. Our research shows that displaying a thumbnail of the digital publication on your home page increases publication use by 21%. And if you really want your publication to make a splash, we recommend any links or banners to the digital edition be placed along the Z-Layout path of your website.

Advertise your digital edition in your printed publication
See a big bang for your buck when you advertise in your printed publication. You’ll reach your entire distribution list at almost no additional cost to you. Be sure to let your print subscribers know all about the benefits of using the digital version – quick search, immediate access, direct click to order, easy to share with friends, video/audio for deeper product info, etc.

Provide the option to view your digital edition in lieu of ordering a printed copy
This provides your customers with immediate access to what they wanted, and could drive repeat traffic if they start using it. Our studies show that one out of three people will choose the digital edition of your publication over the printed version. Additionally, offering a digital version of your publication will appeal to the increasingly “green” consumer.

Offer incentives for using your digital edition
Everyone loves a discount. Why not encourage your customers to browse the digital publication and then reward them with a discount toward their next online purchase? Or, provide exclusive content in your digital version.

Adopt a few of the promotional strategies mentioned here, and we guarantee you’ll not only keep your readers engaged with your publication but flocking to your Dirxion digital edition.

Have you had success promoting your digital edition? Feel free to share your results or other promotional ideas by adding a comment below.

Ever heard of Dickinson, ND? No? Well, most of us hadn’t either until we started serving Badlands Directory Company, which serves Southwest North Dakota, as well as portions of South Dakota & Montana. Using our very new Search Engine Marketing platform, we recently provided a SEM campaign for Badlands Directory Company, helping them become more than just a little place on a big map.

Our first task was to determine if people were searching for a local yellow pages site in communities covered by Badlands Directory Company. Using a wide range of keywords, keyword phrases, powerful ad copy, and targeting the search engine results to show up in their region, we have seen a dramatic increase in site usage. Over a 30-day period, page views are up 36 percent, URL click-thrus are up 71 percent and overall activity within the online phone book is up an astounding 57 percent.

As with any SEM campaigns, we continue to monitor it’s progress. By doing this, we can identify underperforming keywords or ad variations. We can also identify what to target in future campaigns. The next step is to identify categories that are being searched in the Badlands Yellow Pages and target those in future campaigns.

The bottom line: A SEM campaign can add significant value to an online publication, especially in its infancy. For more information about how you can use Dirxion’s Search Engine Marketing platform to boost your presence, please contact us at 866.391.0202 or sales@dirxion.com.

Despite a struggling economy, search engines like Google are thriving due to increased advertising sales, namely through their pay-per-click program otherwise known as Google Adwords. Google Adwords are the ads that appear at the very top and down the right sidebar when a user performs a keyword search. Google Adwords (and similar programs on other search engines) are a highly popular and ROI friendly way for companies small and large to get attention from users searching for keywords related to their business.

Google, according to Rich Stokes, Founder and CEO of AdGooroo, increased their active advertiser account by a mind blowing 54.9% in the fourth quarter of 2008, as compared to fourth quarter 2007. Microsoft (the MSN search network) increased their active advertisers by 11.5% from the third to fourth quarter, which is very strong considering they have a fraction of the market share compared to search giant Google.

There’s never been a better time to jump aboard the pay-per-click advertising model, which is something that Dirxion will very soon be officially offering our customers. There are a considerable amount of benefits to running a PPC campaign for your companies website, including but not limited to:

1. Increased traffic to your website.

2. Increased brand awareness.

3. Higher quality, targeted traffic.

4. Quick exposure to the masses.

There are many more benefits to start what is commonly referred to as a “Search Engine Marketing” campaign for your business, but the ones above should be enough reason for anyone to get excited.

We’ll update the Dirxion blog and Dirxion website with more official information about our new search marketing service in the very near future, but if in the mean time you have any questions, or would like to get something going right away, you can always head over to our contact pageand get in touch with us at your convenience!

Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are two terms that you’re probably hearing more and more in your daily marketing activities. While they’re still relatively new, they are definitely terms that you need to be at least somewhat familiar with, primarily because online consumer purchasing statistics continue to skyrocket each and every year, and because small businesses are finally realizing that they’re losing potential revenue every day to their competitors that are actively practicing SEO and/or SEM.

For the sake of explaining SEO and SEM in simple terms, let’s talk about the differences, and the pros and cons of each. More advanced readers will already know that SEO is actually a sort of “subset” of SEM, but we’re going to try and keep it as simple as possible.

SEO

Let’s say you have some sort of e-commerce website that you sell green widgets from. Obviously, the more people that hit your site, the better chance you have of converting them to paid customers, right? Well, one of the first and ongoing major concerns of any small business or individual that wants to tap into online revenue channels is traffic. It’s the same thing as having a brick and mortar style store. If you don’t have that steady flow of foot traffic, you don’t make any money, right?

At some point in time, back in the late 90’s, webmasters started to realize the staggering numbers of people that were using search engines to find websites and more importantly, to find websites that they wanted to purchase items/services from. It didn’t take long before someone thought “hey, if my site ranks higher than my competitors site, then I stand a better chance at getting the potential customer’s business”. It was only a matter of time before webmasters and marketers started hunting for ways to increase their rankings in the search engines, and even though SEO is a constantly changing beast (and it has changed drastically from the early years), there are practices today that remain pretty constant.

Practicing good SEO on your site involves many different processes, and it takes time. The time factor can’t be stressed enough. Too many people give up on SEO after a few weeks or months because they’re not seeing immediate results. Let’s say you wanted to rank in the top 10 results on Google for even a semi-competitive keyword (such as “green widgets”), it would take months and months to see any kind of positive result. Now, keep in mind that when you do put in the time and do everything right, the rewards can be huge. Obtaining one of those valuable top 5 or top 10 results (meaning, when someone searches for your most desired keyword, and your site shows up in the listings on the first page) can pay off tremendously, and at that point, you can start to enjoy the spoils of your hard work (or the hard work that you paid an SEO company to do for you, either way).

To conclude, SEO should be a part of your website marketing strategy (actually, it’s an absolute necessity these days) and whether you do it yourself, or hire a qualified SEO company to do it for you, the payoff will likely be well worth it. There are other factors to keep in mind though, the main one being the overall look and feel of your website. Let’s say you are in fact ranking well in the search engines, and people are coming to your site – but then what? Is your site worthy enough to convert those search users into sales? This is where a lot of people fall short, and wonder why they’re not raking in the dough after they finally achieve good rankings. Internet users, in general, have very short attention spans. If your site can’t capture their attention (and you have in the neighborhood of a few seconds to do that), then your numbers will definitely reflect it. Make sure your site is presentable, clean, sharp, good sales copy, and is able to actually convert searchers into customers.

SEM

Now that we’ve talked a little about the basics of SEO, we can jump across the road and explore SEM (search engine marketing). SEM can encompass many aspects of online marketing, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll talk about it in the same sense that a majority of webmasters know it as – PPC.

PPC (pay-per-click) is a form of advertising that, by now, you’ve seen a lot of. If you’ve ever been to any of the major search engines, you’ll notice that when you search for a term, such as “green widgets”, the search engine returns your classic list of results down the page, but you’ll also notice that there are other results down the right hand side of the page. Those results are actually ads that other webmasters are paying to have placed there for people searching for their desired keyword.

For example – Let’s pretend that you have a new website that sells chocolate candy. Even if you’ve already started practicing good SEO for your site, chances are good that it will be several months out before you start ranking for any of your target keywords (such as, “chocolate candy”), and in the mean time, you need a way to get your brand and product seen by the massive number of search users every day. That’s where SEM comes into play.

As long as you have the budget for it, even a brand new website can be seen in the search engines from day one. The way it works (going back to the chocolate candy example) is that you would sign up with one of the big search engines – we’ll use Google for example. Their PPC program, which is called “Google Adwords” is the interface you use to get your ad seen in the search engines by bidding on your desired keywords. The way it works is if you want to rank on the first page of Google search results for the keyword “chocolate candy” you would sign into your Adwords account, write a small text ad (like the ones you see on the right side of the search results), and you’ll actually set a “bid” amount for that particular keyword. The higher the bid you set, in general, will determine how high you rank for that keyword. Each time someone clicks your paid ad, you are charged for that click. So if it is costing you .25 cents to rank on the first page for a particular keyword, and you’re willing to spend $10 per day, you stand the chance at getting 40 extra visitors per day to your site. The cool thing is, since the ad was served to the end user through a keyword search, the traffic is typically highly targeted. In simple terms, if someone typed in “chocolate candy” in the search engine, and the end user saw your paid ad – they’re probably clicking on it because they want more information and/or a possible place to purchase chocolate candy. If your website delivers a solution to their problem, then you just landed a new customer.

The possibilities are limitless with PPC – it all depends on your budget. Obviously, the more you’re willing to spend, the more exposure and potential new customers you stand to gain. If you’re confident that your site can convert search users into paid customers, then you may be willing to spend more and more, because in general, PPC is much cheaper than traditional marketing channels. Spending $100 on PPC will almost always get you more potential customers than spending $1000 on a traditional paper mail campaign. Justifying the costs associated with PPC will become very easy once you understand what keywords are working well for you, and how much you’re paying for them. Like anything else in the business and marketing world, it all boils down to ROI (return on investment).

Summary

I know you were just hit with a lot of information, but hopefully it was simple enough for even a beginner to understand. As you would expect, there are more advanced and deeper explanations and theories that go along with SEO and SEM, but this should give you a general understanding of each, and how they’re different from each other. Just in case it didn’t, check out the pros and cons below:

SEO

Time consuming, yet potential huge payoffs in the future. When you finally start to rank well for your keyword, you are essentially getting free traffic from the search engines.

New websites won’t stand a chance at first against competitors that have been practicing SEO for years.

Basic SEO can be done by you, although more advanced and “fast track” SEO can be performed on your site by qualified SEO providers. Again, it still takes time (and potentially a lot of money, depending on what keyword(s) you’re optimizing for).

Slow, but steady in the long run.

SEM

Costs involved up front, but immediate exposure in the search engines.